Many people believe that it only takes 21 days to form a habit. If this were true, then every 21 days, you'd be rewiring your brain to prefer a healthier diet, crave exercise, automatically tune-out your favorite guilty-pleasure, and achieve just about every single goal you routinely fail to achieve. There's a good chance that if you've attempted to make any of these changes, that you struggled, failed in your first attempt, tried again and failed again, and then maybe if you kept at it, after several months to a year, you finally nailed it.

I don't know about you, but my Facebook feed is full of sponsored content promising to double my email subscription list, attract 10-times more website visitors, and convert 50% more users. Claims like these are motivating, and can pull people in to take a closer look. However, what really counts, is the ability of the person who makes these claims, to offer you a viable path to those outcomes.

There’s a simple reason why you need to understand how emotions work, and it's this: emotions drive people’s decisions, not rational thinking. So if you want to understand how to build more persuasive tech, you’d better invest some time to learn how emotions work.

Emotions are so hard to study, many scientists ignore them

People are often surprised when I tell them that scientists don’t fully understand how emotions shape behavior. They’re even more surprised when I tell them that many behavioral scientists don’t even bother trying to understand emotion because they're difficult to measure, and it's much easier to study the external factors that shape behavior.

How companies use social pain, to stop customers from leaving

By Brian Cugelman, PhD with editorial production from Debra Weinryb

When it comes to emotional design, people typically talk about positive emotions and user experiences, like how products can make people feel happy. But what they rarely discuss is using emotional design to evoke negative emotions, like stress, anxiety, and even pain.

This is a pop-up that’s triggered on Get Response (www.getresponse.com) based on tracking mouse patterns that indicate users are about to abandon the page. Their joke message plays off attachment anxiety.

Lots of people have asked about the research behind our micro inforgraphics. Here are the citations behind our 2015 materials.

Jiwa, M., S. Millett, et al. (2012). “Impact of the Presence of Medical Equipment in Images on Viewer’s Perceptions of the Trustworthiness of an Individual On-Screen.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 14(4).